Audio and video information may be compressed to remove redundancy within the information. This allows the information to be stored using less memory. It is common to store audio as MP3 format which uses a reduced amount of memory. The advantage of storing the information is in this way is that a fixed amount of memory, such as available in a portable MP3 player or the like, may actually store more audio information.
MP3 players are commonly found in various types of computing devices. Stand-alone computers can play MP3's, as can Personal Digital Assistants (quote PDAs”), telephones, and other devices. Any electronic device which includes some kind of processing element can be used to read and write compressed audio and video information.